Real data and musings on the performance of networks, servers, protocols, and their related folks.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Web Syndication Format Market Share

For quite a while my todo list has had an instruction to find and characterize the popularity of RSS vs ATOM . Which syndication format is more popular?

Atom seems on the face of it to be a better format than RSS, but some of what it addresses are not really wide spread problems for operations. Market share will tell if it was a solution looking for a real problem or not. Atom is about 2 years old - and it is pretty common to see atom feeds available around the net now.

Measuring the breakdown among my own set of feeds that I read isn't terribly useful. I have a bias in my selections - it isn't like measuring my connectivity or transport properties where I am representative as a sample.

For the record: I have 112 feeds, 54 of them in atom and 58 in some kind of rss.

The best information I could find was from syndic8.com. But frankly, it wasn't very satisfying. The site didn't feel very complete, and in the end only showed essentially the ratio between RSS and Atom offerings. They listed about 1/2 a million feeds - 82% of which were some flavor of RSS.

What I want to know is the ratio between active usages (i.e. fetches) of the two formats. Lots of sites offer both formats - but which do users actually consume?

Feedburner clearly has this info - but I couldn't find it published anywhere.